


On Loving a Monster

by aghamora



Category: How to Get Away with Murder
Genre: Bathing/Washing, Blood, Character Death, F/M, Heavy Angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-02
Updated: 2017-02-02
Packaged: 2018-09-21 13:48:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,997
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9551654
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aghamora/pseuds/aghamora
Summary: “Kindred spirits. Alike in their darkness. She’s crazy. He is, too. He wants to laugh, suddenly.They’re perfect for each other.”Or, Laurel crosses that line. Frank cleans up the mess.





	

**Author's Note:**

> This was basically born from my fic Stay Alive, which has a part where Laurel nearly kills Wes’s killer but stops, and I was like, well, what would happen if she actually did? And then this was created. Given how often Laurel’s mother and her mental health have been referenced in the show recently, it doesn’t seem entirely farfetched for Laurel to go a bit off her rocker and join the murder club.
> 
> No pregnancy here. I hate that plot and I have other shit to focus on.

 

 

 

> _His hands shake something furious,_  
>  _and you don’t know how to stop them,_  
>  _don’t know if they belong to a killer or a lover,  
>  _ _or if there’s even a difference anymore._
> 
> _His shadow dances with yours_  
>  _in the streetlights;_  
>  _your darkness has found a kindred spirit,_  
>  _but you are still trying_  
>  _to take the fear from his mouth._
> 
> _Demons and angels are at war inside of him,_  
>  _and you swear to love every single one,_  
>  _swear to love him wicked,_  
>  _swear to love him holy._
> 
> _He is licking prayers_  
>  _he stopped believing_  
>  _into your mouth;_  
>  _if you thought kissing him_  
>  _would save him,_  
>  _you were dead wrong._

\- Emily Palermo, On Loving a Monster

~

 

“Something happened,” is all Laurel tells him over the phone. “I need your help.”

It’s late, around half-past one when her call comes in. In Frank’s sleep-addled state the words don’t register at first, and he raises a hand to his eyes, rubbing the sleep out of them, easing himself up slowly in bed as his eyes adjust to the darkness. There’s an eerie hollowness, in the words. No tears, no fear; just facts. A flatly-stated request, almost business-like.

Immediately his stomach sours.

“Huh?” he rasps. “Laurel, what’re you talkin’ about?”

“I need you to come over,” she grinds out; terse. Sharp. Biting, now, each syllable a bullet chewed between her teeth. “Door’s unlocked.”

A click, then silence – and with that, she’s gone.

He doesn’t know what to do, at first; he just stares at his little LED screen in the darkness, immobile, stunned. It’s been so long since she’s called him. Wanted to see him – but he has a bad feeling about this. _Something happened. I need your help._

No, he doesn’t think she wants to see him for any sort of sentimental reason at all.

She’s calling him because he can be useful to her now, because she did something and needs his help, and he doesn’t know what that means but he picks himself up nonetheless and pulls himself together and goes; of course he does. He’s like a dog waiting for the call of its master – any one of three masters, really – and when it comes there’s no escaping it. So he throws on a shirt and jeans and a coat, and ambles sleepily out to his car, pulling out onto the street, heading to her apartment so automatically he barely has to think, barely has to navigate the grid of streets and stoplights. He’s there within half an hour and pulls up to the curb, stepping out and ascending the stairs to her floor, heart pounding like it’s half-trying to cave his chest in. It’s freezing cold, and he’s shivering when he reaches her door, and there’s something in his throat, clogging it up, packing it painfully tight like gravel.

The door is unlocked. Like she said it would be.

Inside, then. Everything feels like flashes of a skipping film, disorienting. Her apartment is dark, and it’s a blinding sort of darkness, eerily still and empty and full of imaginary ghosts. She isn’t in the living room, and when he steps into the puddle of moonlight gathering beneath the window he narrows his eyes; nothing has been disturbed, as far as he can tell. No one had broken in.

“Laurel?”

His voice. He musters it, somehow, as he ventures deeper inside, heart lodged bloody and aching in his throat. There’s no answer, only silence, only a persistent ringing in his ears, and he gulps, stepping out of the room, turning the corner into her kitchen. She isn’t answering. He doesn’t know what that means, but terror is burrowing into his bones as he pads across the carpet. Laying eggs and festering in him like maggots.

He rounds the corner, skids to a halt. And that’s when he sees it.

At first, through the thickness of the night, Frank isn’t sure what he’s looking at. He blinks. Once. Twice. And slowly, very very slowly and somehow also fast enough to send his head reeling, things come into focus.

Blood.

It looks black in the moonlight. It coats the tile floor in a growing pool, oozing, thick as tar, glimmering where the light catches it. It’s splattered, too; on the cabinets, maybe all the way up to the cupboards, black spatters and smears like a gory canvas; a macabre pallet of black and red. It’s everywhere, so much of it all at once Frank blinks and he’s sure this isn’t real, can’t be real, must not be real. He can smell it, that thick metallic copper scent permeating the air, creeping into his nostrils and down his throat, making bile rise in his throat.

A body. He can’t make out the features at first; his mind is shutting down, ice crackling in his veins like a thousand tiny splinters beneath his skin. But then he does. He sees that familiar well-styled dark hair, the curve of a nose and mouth that once held sneering smirks. Pale skin. Bloody skin. Walsh.

And then there’s her. Then he finally sees her.

“Frank.”

He flinches when she speaks his name, and his head snaps in the direction of the sound, and he finds her there, sitting down, back pressed up against the wall, hugging her knees to her chest. A bloody kitchen knife, resting nearby, catching the moonlight and gleaming ominously. Her phone too. Blood on her. All _over_ her. She’s soaked in it, clothes damn near saturated, dyed crimson. Dainty hands slick and sticky. The greys of her irises glint in the moonlight, too, like a knife blade, but worse, so much fucking worse; they pierce right through him more than any blade ever could, chilling him to the bone. She isn’t shaking, though. She’s just staring, just looking at him.

Staring at him so terrifyingly calmly, with a look of lethal, calculating tranquility. 

He wants to speak. Can’t. He can’t speak and he doesn’t think he’s ever going to be able to fucking speak again as he takes in the sight around him, his chest constricting and his throat with it, the panic tightening around it like a noose. He might be shaking. He isn’t sure.

_Say something. Anything. Do something. You fucking idiot, DO something._

He can’t do anything now.

“You-” he finally manages, the words sticking in his throat. His eyes sweep the room again; not much is disturbed. This hadn’t been a struggle; it’d been a fucking slaughter. All he can manage in the end is, “Laurel…”

Silence. Laurel holds his gaze, unwavering, unflappable. Unafraid. Wholly unaffected by the scene before her eyes, by the cooling corpse only feet away from her. She’s bloody; covered in it, sitting there still so regal like some ancient goddess, fed by human sacrifice. It’s on her face, a drop or two. She could paint her lips with it. Bathe in it. There’s so much.

He’s never seen so much in his life.

“He did it,” is all she murmurs, voice low, reverberating off the walls, amplified a thousand times to Frank’s twisted ears. He can’t move. Breathe. Think. Speak. All he can do is listen. “Killed Wes. He told me.”

It takes everything in him, every scrap of energy, every ounce of willpower, not to be sick, not to drop to his hands and knees and let his vomit mingle with the blood. Laurel isn’t looking at him, now. She’s staring straight ahead, eyes fixed on something; something he can’t see. Something maybe only she can see, that only exists for her.

“He was gonna leave,” she tells him, recounting the story expressionlessly, play by play. “He turned to go, and I grabbed the knife. Stabbed him… in the back. He fell. And then I just kept going.” Her eyes flicker out of focus, the whites of them abruptly huge and hollow, almost demonic, consuming the irises. “I couldn’t stop. Even after he stopped moving. I just… I just kept going.” A pause. “I couldn’t make myself stop.”

No. No, no, no, no. He may be saying the words aloud. He also might be saying nothing at all. He doesn’t know.

But _she_ is saying something. She’s talking, again, peering up at him, and suddenly there’s a flash of something human, something real; something close to fear, but not quite. No, she isn’t afraid. Laurel simply looks like she’s acknowledging the fact that she _should_ feel afraid, cataloguing that human emotion and processing it, like a machine learning new code. Ultimately, though, she seems to reject it and fade back into that nothingness, that abyss.

“I didn’t…” She drifts off, swallowing. “I didn’t know who else to call.”

A child, he thinks. She looks like a child before him.

A child who’s made a mess too big for her to clean up.

He can feel panic careening toward him, fast and relentless as a train on a track, and his mind is all screaming and screeching and sparks, and his ears are ringing but somehow he forces it away, stomps it all down and boxes it up and tucks it into a tiny little corner somewhere inside himself. _Put it away_ , he’d told her once; that’s what he always does and he does it again, then. He won’t be any goddamn use to her if he panics.

“Anyone-” His voice cracks. He clears his throat, mind booting down into that familiar, half-alive mechanical state. No emotions. No thoughts. Just actions. “Anyone know he was here?”

She shakes her head. Okay. Okay, so he doesn’t need to imminently relocate her.

Okay. He can handle this.

“You call anyone but me?” No answer. She doesn’t seem to hear and so he raises his voice, crouching down beside her. “Hey. You call anyone but me?”

She shakes her head again, finally. “No.”

No one else is involved. They have time. Time to plan – but he looks at her, all hollowed out and gone away on the inside, eyes bleary and glazed over as if she’s in a trance, and he knows she won’t be much help planning like this, in this half-catatonic state. She won’t be any help at all and that’s why she called him. Called him to clean up her mess. Like he always does.

He said once that he would do anything for her, and he still would, and she knows that. They both do. It's the only thing he knows, anymore.

“We…” He drifts off, panic splitting his mind in half before he shakes it off, composes himself. There’s no we in this. Just I. Just him. “I gotta get the body out of here. You got anything I can put him in?” Nothing, again. Again, she genuinely doesn’t seem to hear him, or even recognize that he’s there beside her though he’s crouched close enough to touch her. “Laurel, hey. You got anything we can put him in?”

She flinches, and thinks, and then gives him a faint, “Suitcase. Under the bed.”

Suitcase. He feels a sharp burst of laughter bubble up in his chest. Of course it’s a fucking suitcase.

Well. It’ll do.

He goes for the bedroom. He takes care not to step in the blood, track it around her apartment; carpet presents a whole set of unique challenges when stained by blood, and the kitchen is teeming with DNA and blood as it stands but that’s tile, and he can wash tile, bleach the fuck out of tile. He can handle tile. He can handle this. So Frank doesn’t allow himself to think. If he does he’ll go crazy, go fucking insane; if he allows himself to contemplate what she’s done, what she’s turned into; that monster. That killer. She crossed that line tonight. There’s no going back. She’s like him, now.

She’s like _him_.

He doesn’t allow himself to think, and before his mind can reawaken and protest he’s hauling the suitcase back into the kitchen and unzipping it, but not going for the body just yet. He rummages in her cupboards, for a while, before he locates what he’s looking for: a box of rubber gloves, to keep his fingerprints off of anything, off of Connor’s body. Connor. The body is Connor. Oliver. _Oliver_. He can’t think about that either, let himself contemplate the repercussions of this – for her. For him. All of them.

He can’t think. He just works.

His mind shuts down entirely and he becomes one mindless, mechanical mass of limbs on autopilot; of hands that grab the body and let it fall with a dull, dense _thud_ down into the suitcase, of muscles that strain as he damn near has to snap Connor’s arm in half to get him to fit inside, of feet that descend the stairs and toss the bloody suitcase in his trunk then plod their way back up to her apartment, hastily. He comes to a stop before Laurel again, sinking back down so that he’s at eye-level with her. He’s covered with blood too, now, matching the gruesome pattern on her clothes, and he has no goddamn clue why but suddenly he wants to laugh again, laugh until he can’t breathe. Until he pukes.

Where does it end. The body count. Where does it stop.

Probably it never will.

“Hey,” he says, moving his face in front of Laurel’s so she can meet his eyes, but her gaze keeps slipping and sliding away from him, and he can’t pin it down, get her to look at him, so finally he reaches out. Grasps her shoulders and holds her firm, and the contact sends such a powerful jolt through her that she comes back to herself, from whatever prison of her mind she’d been lost in. “Hey, I gotta go, okay? I gotta get rid of the body. Don’t-” Something cuts him off. Something welling heavily in his throat, like a knot. “Don’t go anywhere. Don’t move. I’m gonna be back. You hear me?”

It takes her a moment. But again, she nods, giving him verbal confirmation, as if she can sense that he needs it. “Okay.”

 _Sit. Stay._ Laurel doesn’t question it. She obeys with all the single-mindedness of an animal, with an owlish blink and a slow, accepting nod.

He doesn’t want to leave her; he has no goddamn clue what she’ll do with him gone, if she’ll decide to pick that knife up and slash her wrists and paint the room an even gorier shade of red. If she’ll call someone else. Go to the police. But she looks barely awake, barely even alive, and with any luck she isn’t capable of doing any of those things, so Frank takes one last look at her, and he goes. If she wants to do any of those things, she will. He can’t stop her; it’s going to happen how it’s going to happen, and dumping the body is priority number one. He can’t let himself think about anything else.

She killed Connor. Stabbed him. Butchered him. Hurt him like he hurt Wes. She couldn’t stop herself. She’s like him, now. She crossed that line, entered that dark place there’s no coming back from.

No. Stop. He can’t think that. Can’t think at all.

He drives to the woods, on the edge of campus, parking as far away from the road as he can manage. It’s late at night and the darkness flocks to him easily, enfolding him; there aren’t any people about, and the woods has been an admittedly shitty spot to hide bodies in the past, sure, but it works as a temporary solution, until he can figure something else out. He tries to be careful, though it’s certainly possible he’s being entirely careless, that he’s going to get himself and her and all of them caught. He should call Bonnie. Annalise. But they won’t help. They can’t. Laurel called him for a reason.

He buries the body and gets it over with, and the ground is cold, and it takes longer to dig than it should. He loses track of time. With the frosted ground all he can manage is a shallow grave; he’ll come back for it later, figure something else out once he makes sure Laurel is all right. He tries not to look at Connor’s body, tries to ignore the blood-soaked shirt, chest slashed open, littered with stab wounds. He’s seen his fair share of bodies before, sure. Seen blood. But he’s never seen something so gruesome, so savage. He has no idea how many times she’d stabbed him, but it may be upwards of twenty. Thirty, if he looks close enough. Something took control of her, that monstrous, rabid impulse in her brain. Laurel did this. His Laurel.

He can’t think about that. He’s going to scream if he does.

He has blood and dirt on him once he’s done; he’ll have to burn his clothes, dump the stained suitcase somewhere too, but for now it can stay in his trunk. For now he’s safe. He knows he’s rushing, missing details, being far too hasty; his mind is overloaded, sputtering like a malfunctioning motor. He’s going to get himself caught. And her. Maybe they’d deserve it. He knows he would.

She’s right where he left her when he returns, an hour or two or three later; still slouched against the wall, still covered in blood that’s drying now, caked in the creases of her palms, congealing underneath her fingernails. For a second he almost isn’t sure she’s breathing at all, and she doesn’t react to his presence, just stares ahead, looking only barely conscious. There’s no horror, in the look in her eyes. No nothing. She isn’t even remotely affected by what she’s done. She’s sitting in a pool of blood, and it’s smeared on her hands, chest, arms, neck. There’s a stripe of it on her cheek, and it looks black, oily and damning. He stares until the sight is seared into his retinas. Stares at her. Tries to see Laurel underneath, the Laurel he knows – but he can’t. This isn’t Laurel, sitting before him. Not now. Not ever again.

That girl is dead, and she died tonight, and he helped kill her.

Stop thinking. No time for contemplation now. He kneels down beside her, and she finally looks his way, staring with that same flat blankness in her eyes.

“I took care of it,” he says, his voice strained. He has to tear the syllables from his throat; it hurts to speak. “We gotta get you cleaned up.”

She looks away, lowers her eyes, doesn’t answer. She’s playing with her fingers, staring at them, morbidly transfixed and completely unperturbed.

Frank moves closer, lowering his face close to hers, almost as if to kiss her. He’s begging now, begging her to answer, give him some sign she’s still in there. That she’s still herself. “Hey, Laurel. Look at me. We gotta get you cleaned up now.”

“I don’t wanna move,” she mumbles, shrugging him off when he tries to touch her.

“I know. But you gotta.” Frank gulps, reaching out and starting to help her to her feet – and she doesn’t fight him, but she isn’t exactly complying, either. Her body is boneless, limp. He’s half dragging her. “C’mon. Up and at ‘em.”

Somehow, some way, he manages to wrestle her to her feet, and he stands there a moment, taking her in, trying to keep his stomach from lurching. In the silver moonlight her skin is ivory. Her shirt and jeans are saturated with blood; he’ll have to burn her clothes, too. Burn her clothes and then maybe fling himself in the fire and take her with him, and let them both burn together.

But for now he takes her bloody hand in silence, and he leads her to the bathroom.

He puts down towels on the way to keep her from dripping on the carpet; she has enough blood on her that she would. It reminds him of some child’s game, pretending the floor is lava, and Laurel steps carefully across them until she reaches the bathroom, crossing over the threshold. He comes to stand before her as she does, and quickly, methodically, begins to strip her, peeling off her shirt and helping her out of her jeans and doing away with her underwear until she’s nude. They don’t talk; they don’t have to, don’t have to agree on any of this. He knows Laurel is in no state to wash herself and he’ll have to do it himself, so he strips too, unceremoniously, turning on the shower and stepping in, beckoning her to follow.

She does, leaving a trail of bloody footprints behind on the pristine tile floor.

They’re naked, standing only feet apart, but there’s nothing even remotely sexual or intimate about this; it’s nudity for a purpose, and Frank feels too sick to look at her body anyway, streaked with blood as it is. Finally, underneath the bright lights, it becomes red instead of black; sickening, sticky crimson. She’s covered in it, and blood has never particularly bothered him but suddenly it makes nausea churn in his gut, poison his bloodstream; all-consuming, overwhelming. Seeing it on her. Evidence of what she’s done. But Frank swallows, centers himself and takes a deep breath, and lets her step underneath the spray, doesn’t let his eyes linger.

Most of it washes off in that initial torrent of water, pink streaks swirling around the drain and disappearing. What doesn’t Frank uses a washcloth to remove, lathering it in soap and placing it on her forearms, her hands, where the worst of it is. It’s only then that he allows his mind to wander, to come back to itself; to see and comprehend, for the first time, what she’s done, what she’s become. She didn’t have to kill Connor like that. Didn’t have to stab him until she was soaked with blood, drenched in it. She still could’ve done it. Gotten her revenge in some less gruesome, less cruel way. She didn’t have to do it like this.

And she’s like him now. The realization rattles his bones, down to his marrow. She’s like him. She crossed that line. Took a life with her hands. That’s something you can’t come back from; something with a definitive, life-altering _before_ and _after_. Something that changes you; a distinction you never lose. He can wash this blood off her, sure. But he can’t make it better.

He never wanted this for her. She was light. Goodness. Hope and beauty, and he – and Annalise, and the others – sullied that, but most of all it was him. He did this to her. He should’ve left her alone that first day he’d seen her at the office, never chosen her for the team. He turned her into this; this monster with no humanity, no soul and no mercy.

He’s lost her. He meets her eyes, holds her empty, dim gaze. And he knows Laurel Castillo is dead and buried six feet under, and he has no fucking clue who is standing before him now.

He doesn’t realize how hard he’s scrubbing her arm with the washcloth until she draws back and winces. “You’re hurting me.”

He comes back to himself then, blinking, taking in the patch of skin he’d been cleaning; he’d rubbed it red and raw without meaning to. He hurt her.

He wants to die. Wants her to take that knife and gut him too.

“Sorry,” he chokes out, and soothes his fingers across the spot, hoping to ease the burn however he can. He hurt her. He hadn’t meant to, but he had, and it’s not a big deal at all but abruptly he can feel something in his throat, twisting it shut. He hurt her. He hadn’t tried to, but he _had_ and he will probably keep hurting her as long as he lives, because it’s all he can ever seem to do to her: try to help and hurt her even worse. “I’m sorry.”

He hurt her. But she could hurt him right back, if she wanted. The quiet one. The most dangerous.

He just hadn’t understood _how_ dangerous.

Her palms, next. The blood there is dried, more stubborn, and it takes him a while to clean out of the creases and folds. It’s crusted brown under and around her fingernails too, painting them like gory polish, and he turns her hand around and over as he washes it, intensely focused, eyes trained on her. So much of it. It never seems to stop. For every drop he washes off her ten more seem to appear in its place, coating her like a second skin. Maybe this is a nightmare. Maybe she’s bleeding out. Maybe he is, too.

Maybe it was him she killed instead, and this is his final hallucination as he lies on the kitchen floor bleeding to death.

Laurel hasn’t said much; she’s just watching him silently as he works, as his hands sweep over her chest, close to her breasts, but she doesn’t flinch at the contact, even though they haven’t been together like this in so long, so many countless months. She trusts him implicitly. Still, though, she looks so hollow, and she’s looking at him, eyes fading in and out of focus, but he thinks she’s barely seeing him at all. She’s pliable, at least, not resisting him; she understands she needs to be washed. She lifts her arms when he bids her to, ducks under the spray of water at his urging. Like a doll.

He can’t get it all out from underneath her fingernails, but he does his best, and after doing a half-hearted job of washing himself Frank steps out with her, drying her off with a towel, then drying himself too. His clothes are filthy, but luckily Laurel has one of his old t-shirts still stashed away in one of her drawers and a pair of his sweatpants, which he slips on gratefully once she mentions them. He helps her into a baggy grey Middleton t-shirt, and she slips on underwear but doesn’t bother with pants, sinking down onto the bed and tucking one leg up underneath her.

He pauses, in the bedroom, once they’re both dressed, and suddenly he has no idea what to do with himself. Laurel is sitting perched at the end of the bed, all freshly-washed skin and damp hair, eyes cutting through the night. She’s watching him with a haunting, level stare. Thinking. Something like contemplation is flickering behind her eyes, filling that gaping empty space.

After a moment, Frank goes for the door – but just before he reaches it, her voice sounds out behind him.

“Did you like it?”

A simple, softly-spoken question; sounding so innocent yet so sinister. He turns, and she’s eyeing him, genuinely curious, having regained the ability to speak, returned to herself somewhat.

He can’t breathe. “What do you mean?”

“When you did it. Killed Lila. Mahoney. Bonnie’s dad,” she says, listing off the names without so much as batting an eye, that blood-soaked roster. “Did you like it?”

He has to close his eyes, compose himself for a moment before he can answer. It takes everything in him not to run over to her, grab her by the arms, shake and shake and shake her until he can shake her back to herself, fix her. Make her who she was. But there’s no doing that after this night and he recognizes futility when he sees it, and so he just swallows the disgust gathering in his throat, shaking his head.

“No.”

It’s an honest answer. Laurel pauses, considering that. Then-

“I did,” she tells him, straight-faced, like it’s nothing at all. “I liked it. Making him hurt… the way he hurt Wes. I didn’t feel like myself. I just became somebody else. But I liked it.” She meets his eyes, and it chills his bones, turns them to brittle ice. “I’d do it again.”

She’s entirely free from guilt, he realizes. She doesn’t feel the least bit bad for taking a life, killing Connor for killing Wes; an eye for an eye, like he’d done to Bonnie’s father. He hadn’t felt bad about that either. Hadn’t liked it, yeah, but he hadn’t felt bad, and she… she _had_ liked it. It’d felt right, finally taking her revenge. She’d liked it and suddenly he has no idea what to do with her, how to handle her, what to say. She stares at him, so deathly calm; just stares, unafraid of what he’ll think. Simply stating facts.

She’s unhinged. She’s outwardly rational, and she isn’t rational at all. She’s fucking insane.

He wants to scream, sob, shake sense into her. She doesn’t understand. She doesn’t _get_ it, the line she’s crossed; how, after tonight, nothing will ever be the same, for him and her and all of them, but he’s so tired, and he can’t manage it.

All he can manage is a low, strained: “Get some sleep.”

He leaves her with that. He longs desperately for sleep, for a respite from this madness, her world of madness that she’s drawn him into, but knows he can’t – no, he knows what he has to do.

His work isn’t finished yet.

 

~

 

He scrubs her floor with bleach into the small hours of the morning.

Scrubs until his hands ache, until his knees ache, until his muscles are screaming. Scrubs until the bleach burns his eyes and throat and makes him light-headed, and eats his hands raw. He scrubs until the dawn starts gathering around him, casting light on splatters and smears of blood he hadn’t seen in the darkness, painting them red. It shines in through the window, slanting over him in rays, so bright it makes him wince.

A new day. Everything is different. Last night Laurel crossed a line, and she’s not coming back. She’s lost. She’s lost and now he is, too.

And here he is: cleaning up her mess, like he always is. Like he always fucking will be.

His vision is distorted, head heavy and buzzing, and still, diligently, he works, cleaning the blood off the tile, scrubbing back and forth until it makes him numb, deadens his senses. His vision fades into one hellish blur of white and red and pink, his muscles able only to repeat that back and forth and back and forth motion, like a machine. He goes through all the sponges in her cabinets, then her towels, until they’re lying in a heap in the corner, discarded. Until his hands are pink, too. He has blood on his hands now, too; the blood she’d spilled.

Her blood is his. Her _mess_ is his. He should feel angry, furious. He should want to throttle her for dragging him into this like she always does, like he’s her fucking dog, only good for doing her dirty work, but he can’t hate her. He can’t feel anything. He just feels sick, sick to the point of numbness.

He mistakes the tears in his eyes for irritation from the bleach until he feels them spill down onto his cheeks, and he grits his teeth, so hard he feels like they might break into bits. It wasn’t supposed to be like this. Laurel was supposed to get out, one day. Get away from all this. Be normal. It wasn’t supposed to _be_ like this.

She wasn’t supposed to be like _him_.

He wipes at his eyes with the back of his hand, not giving a damn if he blinds himself with the bleach; there’s nothing worth seeing anymore in this world, anyway. Just more blood. More blood and death and it never seems to stop, and it never will – not until it’s his blood, his death. Hers. He wishes she’d killed him too, last night.

In a way, in doing what she did, she had.

He doesn’t hear her footsteps as she approaches from behind; they’re silent scrapes on the tile, and he only becomes aware of her presence when he catches sight of movement out of his peripheral, a grey blur through his tears. He blinks, and there she is in the light of the young day, sinking down onto the tile next to him, still bottomless, her baggy t-shirt billowing down her thighs. Her hair is wild, disheveled from sleeping on it wet, but her gaze is even, just as empty and serene as it’d been last night. She doesn’t seem to have had trouble sleeping. She looks like she’d slept well, as a matter of fact. Better than she’s slept in ages.

She’s so calm, perfectly placid. He wants her to cry. Scream. Shake. He wants her to be disgusted by the evidence of what she’s done because she should be; any normal person would be. But she isn’t.

He keeps going. Won’t look at her. _Can’t_ look at her. Not knowing what she’s done. Not knowing that he’s lost her and ruined her, and she’s never going to be who she was, never going to be able to come back from this. Laurel doesn’t say anything, either, for a moment. She seems to have a grim understanding of this, of the reason for his tears.

Then, slowly, very slowly, she reaches for his hands.

Frank isn’t sure what she’s doing at first, but she reaches over, taking the bloody sponge from his hands, setting it aside, and tugging them towards her. She turns them up so that the palms are visible – his pink palms, stinking and burning with bleach – and looks at them for a while, as if searching for something, contemplating something, reading some unseen patterns there. It’s the first time she’s touched him in so long, and he feels small as a child before her; a stupid, sniveling child.

It’s a while before she speaks, and when she does her voice is soft, morose. “I’m sorry.”

He meets her eyes, stops up his tears and gulps, but can’t find his voice. She presses her lips into a line, and he’d thought she hadn’t gotten it, before, but she does. She knows she can’t come back, after last night. She understands the line she’s crossed and she’s crossed it willingly, and she doesn't seem to care that she can’t go back.

“I’m sorry I dragged you into this,” she tells him, and laces her fingers through his. She looks so soft and good he wants to weep. “I shouldn’t have.”

He can’t speak. How is ever supposed to speak again. She looks so different to him, suddenly, but she also looks so much the same, and she’s looking at him in a way she’s never looked at him before, in a way he can’t describe. She’s looking at him like she understands him, suddenly. Sees him in an entirely new light.

“We’re the same now. You and me,” Laurel remarks, unaware of how the words gut him. She’s killing him, and she doesn’t need a knife, any weapon at all; she just needs her words. “Killers. Right?”

Kindred spirits. Alike in their darkness. She’s crazy. He is, too. He wants to laugh, suddenly.

They’re perfect for each other.

“You weren’t-” Something cuts him off, traps the words in his throat. He gulps, lowering his eyes to the blood, the stubborn smears of pink on the tile that surround them. “This wasn’t… supposed to happen, Laurel, you weren’t supposed to be like me. Things I did… what I am-” He shakes his head. “That’s not what you are.”

“I thought maybe I’d feel bad,” she says, eyes drifting away from him, heedless of his words. “But I’m not sorry. I’m so… so glad he’s dead.”

He doesn’t know what to say, what to make of her. He doesn’t know if she’d taken joy in the process, in stabbing Connor into a bloody mess, or only in the end result, in killing him like he’d killed Wes. Maybe both. He never had liked killing; he still doesn’t. Killing was always a task – to repay a debt, to get revenge; it was never something he regarded as enjoyable, and it still isn’t.

He doesn’t like it, and he’s so fucking scared she does that he can’t breathe.

A moment passes in silence. Suddenly her touch is hot enough to scald, and he draws his hands back as if he’s been burned, his knuckles dried and splitting. Laurel seems to shrink when he does – like she can see how disgusted he is with her. And he isn’t. He doesn’t want her to think that. But he _is_. He can’t look at her.

“What’d you do with the body?” she wonders, finally.

“Took care of it,” is all he can manage, still refusing to meet her eyes.

“Why won’t you look at me?” Laurel asks, and when he doesn’t answer she scoots closer. “Frank-”

“This wasn’t supposed to happen, okay?” he snaps, suddenly, and she flinches so violently he might as well have slapped her. He notices, and quiets his voice, sagging under the weight of his exhaustion. “Me? I’m gone. I’m no good, there’s no savin’ me, but you…” He drags his eyes up to hers, and finally there’s emotion in hers; something like sorrow. “I didn’t want that to happen to you. You had a chance. You could get out, but now-”

She fixes him with a look, hard as iron. “So what? You hate me now?”

“No,” he croaks, because _God_ no, he doesn’t; he never could.

They lapse into silence, and suddenly she’s giving him a different look; a pitying look, like she feels sorry that he was ever stupid enough to believe she was good, that he made her into some ideal in his head instead of a person, some unattainable embodiment of light that could never last, that was destined to burn out from the start. He was stupid. He’s always fucking stupid, and she’s looking at him like he’s stupid, before the look evaporates as quick as it comes, and gives way to that same faded sadness again.

“I just-” He swallows, clenching his jaw, tearful. “I don’t know when it stops. The blood. It’s never gonna stop – not ‘til it’s me. Not ‘til it's you.”

Laurel pauses, letting the words sink in, lowering her eyes to her hands and eyeing the blotches where his bloody palms had painted hers. Then, she seems to make a decision and reaches for the sponge, holding another out to him.

“So we live with it,” she deadpans, and leans forward onto her knees, starting to scour the tile. “Until then.”

“How?”

He doesn’t know why he’s asking her. _She_ should be the one asking _him_ ; he has more blood on his hands, enough to drown both of them, but he feels like the child now, seeking guidance, seeking an answer; something to cling to when the only thing he’d had to cling to has been torn from his hands.

She doesn’t give him anything. She just gives him a short, sad: “I don’t know.”

He thinks she’s going to say something else, but she doesn’t; Laurel simply turns her attention to the floor and scrubs, signaling for him to do the same. And what else is there for him to do but follow her lead.

Their work isn’t done yet, after all.

So they scrub, and scrub, and clean until the floor is deceptively shiny and spotless and their hands have sopped up the blood, and his head is aching, pounding with pain in time with the beat of his heart. He feels dead, more dead than Connor or Sam or Lila or any of the others can ever be. They all had it easy, he thinks. They got out. Didn’t have to live through this hell. They’re fucking lucky.

And he’s tired. He’s so, so tired.

Laurel senses that, somehow; senses his weariness, how he’s exhausted to the point of dropping, and so gently, she reaches out, and takes his hand like he’d done to her before, and leads him silently into the bedroom, helps him into bed. He lays there for a moment, before he rolls over onto his side, closing his eyes, and it isn’t black behind his eyelids; it’s red, red as blood, the sight burned there. It hasn’t been black in so long.

Eventually Laurel creeps into bed with him, sliding under the covers, curling up and molding herself against him from behind, so warm, so real. He half-wants to protest, tell her they still have so much shit to do, so much shit to do to make sure they don’t get caught, carted off to jail and pumped full of poison on death row, but he can’t manage it. He can’t even manage to wash the blood off his hands; it’s there, sticky and red, both of their hands coated in it.

And she reaches over, after a while, and takes that stained hand of his, slips it into hers, holds on fast, as if clinging to some reality, some assurance; the last thing she knows is real. She hasn’t ever really held him; he’d always been the one holding her, before, but she’s holding him like a child, and he is a child to her then, feels capable of only the limited cognition of a child. It should comfort him, her touch, her affection, the only sign he’s had in so long that she doesn’t hate him – but they’re not bonded by love, anymore, he thinks. They’re bonded by death. Her presence should console him but it doesn’t; it just makes him sick, even if he loves her with a sort of twisted, fatalistic hopelessness, in a way that consumes him with every breath.

And she holds him, holds his bloody hand in hers. And it doesn’t make things better. Maybe it only makes things worse. But she’s there. She’s with him.

Until the next body. Until the next time. Until it’s them.

Until then.


End file.
